But if you think about it, this is an inadequate explanation, because if you truly believe that there is no proof for God, then you’re not going to bother with the matter. You’re just going to live your life as if God isn’t there.

…

What I’m getting at is that you have these people out there who don’t believe that God exists, but who are actively attempting to eliminate religion from society, setting up atheist video shows, and having atheist conferences. There has to be more going on here than mere unbelief.

The key is not to be a jerk – that goes for both the person sharing his views and the person hearing them.

But jerkiness is the difference between the decent guy who’s just not feeling the connection with the Lord and the smug militant atheist who thinks that putting a fish sticker with legs that says “Darwin” on his Prius is biting social commentary.

…

These atheist evangelicals aren’t satisfied not to believe. They think we need to not believe too. They seem to live under the bizarre misapprehension that if they are just rude enough to us believers, we’ll somehow unsee the light, put the scales back on our eyes and cast off our faith to embrace a life of spiritual emptiness.

…

The most annoying ones file lawsuits. Somebody wants to say a prayer before a Friday night high school football game in East Tumbleweed, Texas, and you can be sure some litigious twerp will allege that he is being subjected to the worst religious oppression since the Christians played the lions in the Colosseum.

And what Christmas and Hanukkah season would be complete without some friendless killjoy suing because a town decided to stick a cross and a menorah out in front of city hall? The sight of so many happy, content people seems painful to them. But then, have you even met a happy, content militant atheist? If so, what was the name of his unicorn?

Now I’ll put myself in the mindset of conspiracytheorists and conjecture: Is Anders Breivik actually an agent provocateur for Islam?

Consider the following:

1) He claims to have carried out his shooting massacre in protest the colonization/conquest of Europe by Muslim immigrants. But who did he actually decide to kill? Not Muslims or immigrants, but Caucasians of irreligious/nominally Christian leanings.

2) He cites the Bible and argues his justification for killing. But his citations are out of context and way off, requiring incredible stretches and leaps of logic to fit his agenda. He acts nothing like a Christian, but ordinary Christians bear the brunt of the outraged backlash.

3) He claims his actions are to inspire the West to arouse from its slumber and begin resisting the ‘Muslim invasion’… But anyone with the slightest grasp of what gutless, spineless, milquetoast postmodern European sociopolitics is like (and Breivik claims to be all too aware of it) would know that an act like this would only arouse mass support for Islam, as well as give Muslim agitators potent ammunition in wringing out concessions to make up for the West’s ‘Islamophobia’.

So in one fell swoop, NO MUSLIMS ARE KILLED OR INJURED… But plenty of godless, immoral liberals lie dead. Those Islamophobic conservatives and crusader-spawn Christians take a major PR blow. And Muslims get a (for once) concrete reason for Western Politically Correct handwringing, groveling, apologizing and promises to make up to the Islamic world for the ‘hatred’ shown against their noble culture.

Even though no Muslims were actually hurt, or even directly ‘hated’, in Breivik’s attack.

However, I personally don’t believe that Anders Breivik is some sort of Islamophilic apologist for Muslims, carrying out an incredibly intricate and devious ploy to rouse public and political sympathy for Muslim immigrants (as if there wasn’t enough of that already).

How do we usually know that a terrorist attack (attempted or successful) is motivated by jihad? Their history is usually clearly marked by public proclamations of faith (e.g. Nidal Hassan‘s derision for his infidel coworkers); browsing of extremist and jihadist websites, chatrooms and message boards (e.g. many of the BUSTED terrorist wannabes that The Jawa Report regularly; and of course the telltale giveaway cries of “Allahu akhbar!” as they carry out their murder spree (e.g. Nidal Hassan again and countless others).

None of these markers were present in Anders Breivik, who spent his time polluting fascist chatrooms instead of jihadist ones. He did not ‘come out’ as a Muslim

Very seldom do we hear of a

That said, if Anders Breivik really does turn out to be a ‘secret Muslim supporter’ or a Muslim himself, then his ability to hide/fake his online history and plan out such a convoluted, Tom Clancy-esque strategy shows that is he is a cut above the rest.

1980 Reagan’s 489 electoral votes clearly outstrips Obama’s 365 electoral votes. But fair enough, Reagan got 51.6% of the popular vote against Obama’s 52.9% – though one could argue that the Independent contender John B. Anderson’s 6.70% would other wise have gone to Reagan (using Anderson’s 0 electoral votes as precedent) to give the Gipper a total of 58.30%.

So in 1984, Reagan got a far higher ratio of the electoral vote, states and popular vote than Obama in 2008. Obama is a featherweight compared to what Reagan achieved!

And note that Reagan was running for a second term, which means people voted for his 4 years of proven policies – very different from the untested Obama benefiting from anti-Bush sentiment and a crony media that refused to vet him.

In fact, adjusting for total votes cast (2008’s 129,391,711 which is 40.59% more than 1984’s 92,032,824 or 52.04% more than 1980’s 85,103,195) due to expanding population, if Reagan’s popular votes percentages were adjusted to 2008’s voting population, 1984 Reagan would have gotten 76,558,948 votes – 7,102,051 more than Obama ever managed!

Abdar Rahman Koya accuses me and others of practicing an indifference to history rather than merely being pragmatic in our solution to this problem when we defend the continued existence of the state of Israel and point out the errors in history that have justified anti-Semitism. Yet it is an indifference to history that Koya and others practice that paints a black and white picture of the Palestinian-Israeli issue that continues to promote misunderstanding and even hatred. Always ‘Arab good, Jew Bad’!

When Israel was created, thousands of Palestinian lives had not yet been taken. It was not created through the mass shedding of blood but through debate, albeit heated at times, and the signing of a pen. There were numerous Arab initiated riots prior to that time that had shed blood, mostly Jewish, but not on a massive scale. Israel was created in an area of the Middle East that already had a clear Jewish majority living in it. Just like Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon before it, Israel was created by international powers. The only difference was that it had a majority Jewish population and not Arab Muslim. And contrary to what Koya would say, the vast amounts of Jews who came to this land before and after the Second World War and who eventually fought and died in the ensuing Arab initiated wars, were refugees and not invaders or conquerors. Yet Koya would also probably have us believe that the ethno-cultural background of the Jewish state is not part of the reason that the surrounding countries and peoples sought its elimination.

Mass Arab Palestinian lives were only taken only after the Arab nations declared war and invaded and then maintained this state of war for 60 years. That is historical fact and all of Koya’s desire for revisionism can’t change that. All I ask is when will Arab nations and their Muslim brethren around the world acknowledge their role in the plight of the Palestinian people and their responsibility for finding a peaceful solution outside of the destruction of Israel and the conquering of its people?

It is at least a shared blame as I fully acknowledge Israel’s far than perfect nature and do not absolve them of all their actions in the last 60 years. However, the destruction of Israel and the resulting death of its people (as they will not allow this to happen), counter to what Koya insinuates, is the goal of Hamas. Just read their charter in its entirety to understand that.

I do know what kind of ‘state’ I’m talking about? Israel for all its obvious faults is still a vibrant democracy. Arab Israelis can vote and participate in politics, run newspapers and protest. There is a strong movement for peace and negotiation among all types of Israelis who are free to voice their opinions. There is an active and progressive Supreme Court who forwards the causes of equal rights and human rights for all Israelis. It is one of the few courts in the world to declare illegal all forms of torture including non-lethal torture as was used in Gitmo and Abu Gharib by the Americans. Do I see them as ‘occupiers’ of the West Bank? Yes, they should withdraw to the 1967 borders and dismantle all settlements there. Should Palestinians have a state of their own? Of course I believe that, but not if it means the destruction of another state and the expulsion or death of its people. Who could really accept such a solution?

The International Jew was inspired by and based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So whether the latter is a fake is extremely important to whether we can accept the former. As a former book publisher, Koya should realise this. Hamas in its charter accepts the Protocols as the truth, it is key in their war against Israel and the Jews. Ford and his family, accepted the truth about the fraudulence of the Protocols and apologised for The International Jew. Yet Koya would continue to maintain its underlining “truthfulness” despite knowing that its source was an insipid fake and that the author rejected his own book in the end. That is the faith of a true zealot.

Finally, what does it matter if a book sells well or not? If it is fraudulent then the publisher is morally obliged to either say so or choose not to publish it in the first place. Sales do not mean much. The Protocols still sells well in Iran, whose view of Israel is well known and I’m pretty sure that Mien Kampf still sells well to the neo-Nazis. So what? It means little. If an idea is based on lies and racism then the idea itself is deceitful and racist even if it was unintended to be so.

The San Remo Treaty of 1920, in which the victors of the First World War parcelled out the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire, created a geographical area called Palestine along both sides of the Jordan River.

Article 6 of the Palestine Mandate signed by the League of Nations in 1922 stipulated ‘close Jewish settlement’ on the land west of the Jordan River. The river served as the boundary because that year the UK created a new Arab country, today known as Jordan, by unilaterally bestowing the land east of the river onto the Hashemite dynasty and thus giving some three quarters of Palestine away.

That Mandate treaty obligation to settle the Jews in Palestine from the river to the sea has never been abrogated and endures today. The 1945 UN Charter, Chapter XII, Article 80 explicitly says than nothing within it shall ‘alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties’.

…

Furthermore, Israel’s ‘occupation’ of these areas is legal twice over – since it merely gained them in a war of self-defence in 1967, and is thus legally entitled to hold onto them until the belligerents stop waging war upon it. Which they still have not.

Combined 816 mentions by name and synonym Zion. And zero times by name in the Quran.

Admit It – People Hate Israel and Jews Just For Being Israel and Jews – Israel is an artificial state formed by the Western colonial powers? So are Algeria, Morocco, Jordan – in fact almost ANY Arab state or nation that used to be under Ottoman rule – Malaysia, Pakistan (another case of cut along the dotted religious lines) – and yes, Palestine. And the formation of Israel got a greater than 70% vote in the UN.

Like this:

AS part of my duty as a citizen of Malaysia and a resident of Johor Baru city (Bandaraya), I must report the presence of swindling syndicates in town. Syndicate members plant themselves in the neighbourhood of City Square building and the immigration office (First Link).

They are usually young hooligans who station themselves in high traffic places such as the main Junction of City Square Johor Bahru and opposite Hong Leong Bank at Jalan Wong Ah Fook. They are there until the early hours of the morning.

Basically, their intention in basing themselves there is to get “signatures” randomly from pedestrians in the hope of engaging gullible people in their swindling schemes.

Their presence is not only a nuisance to the residents of the town, but also an eyesore to tourists from Singapore and other countries. They may even be endangering the safety of the public in general.

When these syndicate members fail to gain contact with their intended victims, they yell vulgarities and attempt to use body contact in threatening them. Regardless of the age of the passer-by targeted, they would not fail to cause some harm whenever they are ignored.

Many complaints have already been voiced as commentaries in various newspapers, but no action has been taken to secure the safety of residents in the city.

We hope the police will take appropriate action against these syndicate members for the city of Johor Baru to be safer.

If the newly-amended Evidence Act is all that the media reports make it out to be, then its many loopholes and oversights will be a source of more evil than good. Do the crafters of the amendment really have so little idea as to how the Internet really works?

First as many have already noted, it is all too easy to hack or impersonate someone’s account and post offensive material under his or her name. What is to stop unscrupulous persons from starting unauthorized blogs or Twitter accounts under the name of a rival businessman, politician or even competitor for a girl’s affections?

In fact, these days it’s as easy as waiting for a co-worker you dislike to leave his smartphone unattended for a short while, and then using it to issue death threats against the boss! Meanwhile, it will be all too difficult for the sabotaged person to prove that he did not actually post those remarks himself.

Has the government so quickly forgotten their little spat with hacker group Anonymous? When the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) announced they were banning several file-sharing sites back in June 2011, Anonymous responded by hacking into government websites and defacing them. It was the most that the government could do to claim ‘victory’ since the damage was easily reversible.

But what if hacking ends up having far longer lasting, deeper reaching repercussions… Courtesy of the Evidence Act?

Imagine if after the Act lands an innocent blogger in hot water, the accounts of several prominent persons – say, an outspoken former Prime Minister’s blog, or the current Home Minister’s Twitter feed – inexplicably call for mass racial and religious violence. Will the Evidence Act then be applied in a similar manner, without prejudice between well-connected politician and resourceless layperson?

(By the way, just to clarify: This is a logical prediction, not a threat. Also, for the answer to the above question, see the anecdote about Teresa Kok below.)

Second, I am vehemently against the caveat that gives blog owners little or no recourse when offensive comments are posted on their sites. If it is easy enough for even unskilled persons to hack or hijack an account, it is even easier to sabotage someone’s blog or social website.

Imagine if several disgruntled individuals wanted to take down Malaysiakini or Malaysia Today – even temporarily – or give them countless legal and law enforcement hassles for years on end. All they would need to do is fill the comments section of every page with slurs and then quickly alert the police, complete with screen captures of their handiwork as evidence.

In fact, such a case has happened before in the US new media. A member of prominent blog waited until the wee hours of the morning to post extremely offensive, racist comments at a rival website (under a false name of course). He then boasted to his readers about how the moderators of the website were ‘racists’ because they allowed the disparaging comments to remain visible for hours.

Of course, the moderators of the website were sound asleep in bed at the time! By the time they got to the office and deleted the ugly remarks as per usual practise, the damage had already been done. Thankfully for them, the US does not have an Act that unfairly places the burden of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ on the accused!

Automated moderator/filter programs that rely on banning certain words are not really much help either. If someone were to post a string of four-letter words – each minorly misspelled, or with an asterisk replacing one letter – in conjunction with the Agong’s name, do you think readers and the police would not be able to catch the intended meaning?

In fact, the methods I mention above could be used together in order to bypass a website’s ‘Only Registered Members Can Comment’ safeguard. A hacker just has to access a registered, trusted user’s account and then spam hate under his username. An innocent blog owner together with an innocent commentor will both be in hot water!

Third and most importantly, all the above casual/disorganized attacks pale in comparison to what a well-organized, well-connected operation could do. If a lone, disgruntled Netizen can cause so much havoc as I describe above, then what about an individual or organization that has the resources and manpower to launch a mass undermining of their enemies – complete with hired professional hacking? And what if they have undue influence over law enforcement and the courts?

In the past years, already many bloggers and new media journalists critical of the government have been hauled up for allegedly ‘seditious’ remarks. In many of these cases, the accused’s computer is also confiscated to ‘assist’ in investigations.

Who is to say that the computer – with all its personal, private data and already logged-in user accounts – could not be used to add further ‘evidence’ against the accused? Blog postings can have their time and date of publishing set to any time in the future or past, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the date when the blogger was in the lockup. What alibi can the accused possibly bring up in such a case?

And lest you have any misconceptions about the law being dispensed with ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’, recall that Teresa Kok was rounded up under the ISA based on false reporting by Utusan Melayu. At the very same time, Sin Chew reporter Tan Hoon Cheng was also arrested under the ISA – but instead for truthfully reporting on Ahmad Ismail’s seditious, racist ‘pendatang’ remarks!

Meanwhile, Utusan Melayu’s reporters and editors were not hauled up for their defamatory and untruthful smears – just as they constantly get away with fantasizing about murdering opposition members, throwing slurs and ugly stereotypes at Indians, and accusing Christians of plotting the overthrow of the country. Ahmad Ismail also got away proud and unbowed, in fact more combative than ever!

In conclusion, the end result we can expect is that freedom of speech, freedom of the media and the truth itself will be squashed – directly through baseless arrests of bloggers and tweeters, and indirectly through intimidating others into closing their accounts before they end up sabotaged too.

Think about it, would any Bersih rally have been organized – or truthful accounts of the peaceful rallies vs brutal police tactics made known to the public – if social media were already abandoned by fearful citizens?

So to those who support the poorly conceived parts of the Evidence Act, know that you will have no one to run crying to – no right to complain! – when you end up on the receiving end yourselves.

Turkey’s top Muslim cleric, Professor Mehmet Görmez, had to say: […] “After the Prophet Omar conquered al-Quds he was invited to pray at a church (since there were no mosques in Jerusalem). But he politely refused because he was worried that the (conquering) Muslims could turn the church into a mosque after he prayed there.””

Bekdil continued, “Now, read that line once again, or a thousand times if you wish to: “After the Prophet Omar conquered al-Quds…” And think about why there were no mosques in Jerusalem at the time of the conquest. Still no clue? Allow me to explain: Because Jerusalem was not a Muslim city. And now you claim it back because it is under “Jewish occupation!” The refusal to pray at the church was very noble of the Prophet Omar. I personally do not expect you, dear Islamists, to behave as virtuously and gallantly as the prophet, but at least you can do something easier: Stop fighting for a city that belonged to other faiths before your ancestors conquered it.”

By all eyewitness accounts of that era, Palestine was a total desolation. There were virtually no trees and no people. Because of lack of trees, the weather changed and it rarely ever rained. The irrigation systems of the once fertile valleys were all destroyed, rendering most areas into malaria-ridden swamps. The terraces of the mountainsides were torn down, causing terrible erosion that left only barren rocks. This was the condition of Palestine by the beginning of the 19th century.

It was at this time that Jews began to flee severe persecutions in Russia and Eastern Europe. In the mid-1800s, some Jews came to Palestine and, with the generous aid of some successful Jews like the Rothschilds, began to buy property from Muslim Ottoman Turks. The Muslims thought the land was worthless anyway, so they sold it to the “dumb Jews” for extremely inflated prices.

To everyone’s amazement, the Jews were very successful at reclaiming the land. Many of them died from malaria and the rigorous life the work demanded, but they performed an agricultural miracle that made the land very productive again. As a result of their success, poor migrant workers from the surrounding Muslim countries began to flood in to work for the Jews. The Jews literally became victims of their own success – almost all of the people calling themselves “Palestinians” today are the descendants of those migrant workers.

Much more is said and documented on this subject in my book. But the main point is this: The Muslims have repeatedly shown they understand these things. Since they know that the so-called “Palestinians” are not a homogeneous people, but rather a mixed conglomerate of workers with no cohesive organizational or political skills, they have repeatedly not given them a state.

While Malaysians have always “pulled together” when it mattered, he said, national unity had regressed in recent years.

Raja Dr Nazrin said: “In many areas of public interaction, we seem to have lost a certain graciousness and civility in public life. This trend is not just a Malaysian phenomenon but a worldwide one.”

“In many areas of national life, the spirit of give and take’ that was the societal norm for so long has given way to the spirit of take and take’,” he said in his public lecture on The Challenges Of Governance In Contemporary Malaysia here yesterday.

…

“The challenge for ordinary Malaysians is to be discerning enough to not fall prey to religious or ethnic posturing, or to be swayed by loose promises and ill-founded stories.”

Well, maybe he should look at what has been doing over the past DECADES!

Summary of Me

scottthongblog[at]yahoo[dot]com

Seeking truth, hating lies.

Oh my labels!

Free thinking, but not a Free Thinker.
A Christian and a scientist, but not a Christian Scientist.
Believing in a universal church, but not a Catholic.
Trying to be a saint in these latter days, but not a Latter Day Saint.
A witness for Jehovah, but not a Jehovah's Witness.
Sumitted to God, but not a Muslim.
Seeking knowledge, but not a Gnostic.
Rational in thinking, but not a Rationalist.
Upholding humanity, but not a Humanist.
A supporter of liberation, but not a Liberal.
A supporter of democracy, but not a Democrat.
Acknowledging the importance of social values, but not a Socialist.
Seeking and valuing truth, but not a Truther.